Parenting 101

So there are lots of parents. Obviously, there is a variety between all of them. One of the biggest difference in determining these is 'nurture', which states each distinctive difference everyone has come from they way they were nurtured. This heavily contrasts with the idea of 'nature', that much of our differences come from our biological genes. These two factors, together, determine each of us as people. For example, my small mouth is due to nature, but my habits of not opening my mouth wide come from nurture.

Parenting, however, is heavily dependent on our nurture. One of the reoccurring ideas in many developmental theories is that each parent's parenting styles our a model of their own parents. This correctly supports the notion that people abused as children abuse their own children when they become adults.

Our own parent's are no exception to this idea, which is why parents in different culture raise their kids differently. For example, the common stereotype of Asian parents, easily summed up in the phrase, "tiger mom", is that Asian mothers tend to focus heavily on academics and getting to a good college. However, this is only a cycle of what they had gone through.

For one thing, my mother was not  study intensive as a student. She loved books: Not your common light romantic novels, but recordings about the kings of Korea, or classic pieces of Western literature translated in to her native language. While we, as students, often read these books in order to get grades, her parents were not so happy about all these books, as they were posing as distraction to her studies. Her conservative father heavily affected her, and she, like the majority of her generation, was hit whenever she made him angry, in this case reading a book.

This reflected her ways of parenting. She took time to get me to read books. Furthermore, according to her own words, she "took time to make sure I didn't get hit." However, corporal punishment is still widespread in Korean parents, and its really only because they were raised in that way.

Green Menace

René Magritte's The Son of Man, 1964

-Warren Lee

A green apple is being thrown across the air,

full one hundred miles per hour, at 

a single man standing in front of an old wall.

The man dressed in a black coat and a black bowler hat,

did not see this coming.

He was simply minding his own business,

getting his picture taken.

Oh, he's no model

who would show off his marvelous swim shorts.

In fact, he is going to hide his awe-striking swim shorts

under his dull suit, but rather a common suit.

It's nothing to hide that his suit is worn by many.

It'll make him competely normal, 

someone so normal that they'd fit into the crowd perfectly,

so that if he takes his picture, nobody would notice him and his crooked left arm.

So he got his new camera out, set it on a stand,

went back to stand in front of the wall,

with his back to the vast ocean that smelt like

a piece of rotten old fungus, a fowl stench that would normally make people frown.

But,

maybe he was wrong.

Not only were people not frowning. 

the apple was coming straight for his face.

Blimey, he was not mixing in, in fact, he was very noticeable!

At first, the man wasn't alarmed.

He was rather curious-

a green unripe apple.

What could it possibly taste like?

He was imagining sour juices exploding in his mouth,

covering his throat as if it were trying to invade it.

The next thought blew on him as the apple got closer.

The man could feel the strong gust of wind, 

not simply tingling his skin,

but pushing against his face like a bully pushes little kids in school.

He felt slightly anxious.

Will the apple hit him?

He could hear the sound the wind created by the gale of green,

like the musical crescendo created by a full string orchestra.

Oh goodness, the man was feeling very anxious,

even fearful of what would happen next, buy

people could no longer see the man's face.

They could not feel what the man felt-

his emotions were already hidden under the green menace.

His arms were already hidden under the green menace.

The man in the suit was already hidden under the green menace.

010715: Life Off the Boat

 ^BGM.

Assimilation, to me, is a very delicate topic. It's always been. I have moved 5 times, each time to a different country. This doesn't simply mean a different language or different color of skin the people around me have. It means a different culture, a different mindset, and a different attitude.

When I first moved from West Bloomfield to Seong-Nam-si, I was different from other people. Sure, I had yellow skin and black hair. I spoke korean and could do two digit multiplication. But something about the kids were different. They hit each other or harshly made fun of each other, simply for the fun of it. Classroom wide bullies or even grade-wide bullies were no more a character trait from Horrible Harry. But this was nothing special. Oh, things usually changed within an year when classes or semesters changed, and those kids who were bullied are currently doing very well. Or, that's what I sensed from talking to them over facebook.

Anyway its no big deal. You might me reading, thinking how horrible these 12 year olds must be, but really it's only a difference in the mindset and culture between Americans and Koreans. I can tell my Korean friends that my American friends don't like physical contact and they will react suprised. 

After moving around 5 times, I can tell you with confidence that I am very flexible with meeting new people and adapting to a new environment. But the fourth time I did so, from West Bloomfield to Seong-Nam-si, when peers around me had developed into the culture around them by embracing it, rather than simply being kids, it was hard. The fact that I was different was the biggest issue. So I learned to embrace and assimilate with the people around me. By the time I was in seventh grade, I was not that kid who had moved from America anymore. I was just 010715*.

By the time I moved to a place 30 minutes off of where I used to live before I had moved to Seong-Nam-si, I was, again, diffrent. I assimilated into a group of friends who were like me; who had moved from foreign countries. People call this group, 'fob'. Fresh off the boat, they say. But if you ask people in this group about me, they'll tell you that I am not fob, but instead an American kid who used to live in Korea.

So that's who I am. A hybrid of two cultures jjampponged** into one. Amy Tan claims otherwise. In her short story, Fish Cheeks, she says that "You must be proud you are different" and that "Your only shame is to have shame". However, is not being proud equal to being shameful? I am in many ways similar to another American born person. Many don't even know that I have moved around numerous times. Yet, I am proud to be both Korean and American in various aspects. In many ways I am both an assimilationist and and a disassimilationist.

"I'm a ... walking paradox

No I'm not"

-Tyler the Creator, Yonkers

Amy Tan's mother, in Fish Cheeks, tells Tan that she should "always be Chinese:" While maintaining a culture is great, being someone who is unique is more ideal. Her other works, The Joy Luck Club and  Saving Fish from Drowning, are all about China. Considering her college and birthplace are in America, one could claim that she has kept her cultural backgrounds, but one can also say that she has failed to adapt. 

I've once was in deep worry about who I really am: American? Korean? It wasn't only an year or two ago that I decided not to care. Does it matter? I'm me, and no words can describe me. 

_____________________________________________________________________________
*010715 is a student ID number that changes every year for every students. First two digits stand for my grade number. Note that seventh grade is the first grade of middle school in Korea. Second two digits stand for my classroom (or homeroom. Most classes are in homerooms, and teachers move around classes instead of students.), and the last two digits are my number in alphabetized order, with a gender split. Kids with last names that are front of me in Korean alphabet would have a number less than 15. In American comparison, if someone has the last name Aaron, he'd be 01, because the English alphabet begins with A. Therefore, I was Grade 1, Class 7, Number 15.

**Korean slang term that means: deeply mixed and jumbled. Originally a korean soup bowl of noodles, seafood, some meat, and various vegetables. 

ID

When you sign up to a website, like say, Yahoo, you must choose an 'ID'. While the abbreviation was used throughout the internet around late 1990s to the early 2000s, it originates from two things. Freud used the word 'Id' to categorize a person's instinctual drives, but ID is also used for the short of the word, 'identity'.

We define this ID, or username, when we first join those sites, followed by a long list that includes a password, a birthdate, a gender, an address, a question for your password, an email address (twice), and a repeat-after-me sort of thing where we prove that we are human beings rather than hacking tools. All this following data will be, after you sign up, a way for the servers and machines to define who you are; it will be their perception of you.

Yahoo's perception is often user based content*. This means that it shows ads, content, and news, based on the account information it has. If the account is set to male, it often will show the user a sports or car related content before the ones about pop stars or new fashion trends. However, there are many issues that Yahoo will run into before they make a successful appeal based on the account information they have. First, they cannot tell if their perception is true. Users can afterall, choose to lie on the web.** Second, they cannot tell if their perception matches the identity. For example, a women can be interested in sports and a man might be interested in fashion.

Yahoo thinks that I like cars since I am a man.

This is the difference between identity and perception. Perceptions are made by other people other than yourself. Identity, however, is a definition of yourself defined by yourself. This is just like websites. You choose your own ID for the internet, and the internet chooses its perception based on the information you give them. You can change these perceptions under the 'account settings' button, but you can never change your ID.

                                                                                                                                       
*Yahoo in certain countries do not use this feature. While Yahoo Korea, Yahoo Japan, Baidu, Naver, QQ and several other Asian based web portals uses it for sure, Yahoo Korea closed down at the end of 2012. Furthermore, many of these search engines and web portals now also analyze the trend in the user search queries to find the best appealing contents and ads.

**This is becoming an increasing problem in Asia. "“Nekama” means male participants who represent
themselves as females on the Net" (http://www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/asai.pdf)